Study calls bin Laden a minor player in jihadism

Mark Mazzetti, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, November 15, 2006

2006-11-15 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- As radical Islam spreads globally through online forums and chat rooms, a group of obscure Arab religious thinkers may come to exert more influence over the jihadist movement than Osama bin Laden and other well-known leaders of al Qaeda, a research group at the U.S. Military Academy has concluded.

In a study billed as the "first systematic mapping" of an ideology sometimes called jihadism, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has found that bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have had a relatively minor influence on the movement's intellectual foundation. Among the network's ideologists, they have come to be seen more as propagandists than strategic thinkers.

And while the two al Qaeda leaders have released a flurry of video and audio messages to their followers over the past year, the study found that the scholarly work of a group of Saudi and Jordanian clerics -- most notably Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian -- seems likelier to influence the next generation of Islamic militants.

As a result, the authors found, the death or capture of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri would do little to slow the spread of jihadist ideology.

"It would be a blow in terms of the emotional impact, but in terms of the larger movement that the foot soldiers are being recruited into, it wouldn't put much of a dent into it at all," said William McCants, chief author of the new report, "The Militant Ideology Atlas."

The 382-page report, a kind of who's who of the global jihad movement, examines the most influential and widely read texts among the thousands of tracts in al Qaeda's online library, known as the Tawhed.

With the dismantling of the Qaeda hierarchy that existed on Sept. 11, 2001, and the diffusion of the jihadist movement into smaller, more localized cells, the Tawhed has gained new significance in helping to shape militant thought.

With the U.S. military reorganizing to fight what could be a decades-long battle against radical militants, the military academy has become one of the Pentagon's centers of research on counterterrorism and jihadist ideology. Although located at West Point, the Combating Terrorism Center is an independent research group financed by private sources and the government.